REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF THE
SCHOOL-TO-WORK OPPORTUNITIES ACT

Automated Graphic Systems
White Plains, Maryland

12:28 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Nancy, you may not be famous yet,
but you're a lot more famous than you were five minutes ago.
(Laughter.) I wish I had thought of that Michael Jordan line.
(Laughter.) I'd throw the whole speech away. (Laughter.)

I want to thank Nancy and Laurie and the other students
who showed me around this fine place and showed me what they do here.
I thank you for that. I thank Secretary Reich and Secretary Riley for
the work they have done to put this school-to-work partnership together
with the Education Department and the Labor Department. I thank
Senator Kennedy for his sponsorship of this legislation, and your
Congressman, Steny Hoyer, for the work he did to pass it.

I'm glad to see Mr. Pestillo here, and I thank him and all
those who have worked so hard on this. I'll never forget the
conversation I had with the Ford CEO, Alex Trotman, about this issue in
the White House not all that long ago, in urging more corporate
involvement in business sponsorship of the school-to-work concept.

President Sine, I thank you for being here and for the
work that all the community education institutions in America are doing
to help prepare young Americans to succeed in the global economy. They
may be the most important institutions in the United States today, and
I thank you for that. (Applause.)

I want to thank all the state and local officials from
Maryland who are here -- Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, and
Senator Miller -- I'm glad to see you. And I know that, Governor
McKernan, you shouldn't feel alone, there are lots of Republicans here
today. (Laughter.) County commissioners, members of the House of
Delegates, county officials here, the Sheriff and others.

This ought not to be a partisan issue. And I thank you,
sir, for your leadership. He wrote a fine book about it, which Mr.
Pestillo referenced in his introduction. And Governor McKernan sent me
a copy of it, autographed it, and I read it. And I thought if my dear
mother were still living, she would wonder which of us were more
successful, because she always thought whether you wrote books or not
was a real standard of whether you'd done anything in life.
(Laughter.) So according to my mother's life, you've done something
very important. And we are very grateful to you, sir, for the
leadership you have given this movement all across America. The United
States needs desperately for every young person in this country to have
the opportunity that these young people have had. And thanks to you
and your efforts, more will have that chance. I thank you.
(Applause).

I would also like to thank our host here, Automated
Graphic. Thank you very much for having us here. We are grateful, and
we appreciate it.

I want to say a little about this in a larger context.
What we are doing here today to celebrate the one-year anniversary of
the School-to-Work Program is really adapting to the information age in
the 21st century, one of the oldest traditions in the United States.
Just imagine, for example -- here we are in Maryland -- what if we were
here 200 years ago? You would be a young person living in a settlement
in Maryland called Port Tobacco, which was then a big town around these
pats. You'd be in a promising new country. George Washington would be
your President. John Adams would be your Vice President. Pretty good
lineup. (Laughter.) And everybody would be optimistic, and most
people would be like Nancy -- they'd get up at 5:00 a.m. or 5:30 a.m.
every morning and go to work.

If you wanted a better job, you'd probably leave the
country and come into town, where you would walk down a main street,
and you would look at the people who were working. Two hundred years
ago, you'd see a blacksmith, a carpenter and, of course, a printer. If
you wanted to learn how to do those jobs, you'd simply knock on one of
the doors and hope that in return for hard work, you could get a
craftsman to teach you those skills. That's the way it was done 200
years ago.

And for a long time, that's the way it was done, as one
generation kept faith with the next. Well, we know that we can't
exactly do it that way anymore, but if you think about it, that's what
the School-to-Work Program is all about in modern terms for the modern
economy. And it's very, very important.

This year we are seeing grants that involve over 100,000
students nationwide, over 40,000 employers, including very large and
very powerful employers in this country, but also some very, very small
ones. And there are over 2,500 schools all across America involved in
this program. The act was a genuine partnership; it set up no
bureaucracy whatever. It simply made grants to local partnerships,
many of them in poor areas, and gave students the chance to show what
their hard work could do.

This year, we are doubling the school-to-work funding for
the eight pioneer states that already have programs. Seed grants will
go out to 20 new states so that all 50 states will have some
participation in the School-to-Work Program. By 1997, every state in
America will have a school-to-work program up and running. (Applause.)

One thing that I want to emphasize that is very important
is that the school-to-work program rests on a few very big ideas. One
of the ones that's most important to me is that there is no choice to
be made between practical workplace skills and academic knowledge; that
the two reinforce each other and go hand in hand. When I was growing
up, there was always this bright line between what was a vocational
practical skill and what was an academic skill. It was probably a
mistake then; it is certainly a mistake now. We have to abolish that
line. (Applause.)

School-to-work is for all kinds of students -- after high
school, some will go straight to a job, some will go on to a community
college, others may go to a four-year college. Some who hadn't planned
on getting more education will get more education because they were in
the school-to-work program and because they see it will help them in
their work lives. (Applause.)

Our country has enormous potential and a few very large
problems. You know what they are as well as I do. You know we have
too much crime and violence. You know we have major pressures on the
family and the community in our country. What you may or may not know
is that underlying a lot of this is the fact that more than half the
people in this country today are working a longer work week than they
were 10 years ago for the same or lower wages. And the reason is we
have not created in this country the kind of education and training
programs we need to adapt to a global economy, where everybody's
earnings are to some extent conditioned on the pressures being put on
us from around the world, and where everybody's earnings more and more
depend upon not only what they know, but what they are capable of
learning.

In the last 15 years, for example, earnings for high
school dropouts in the work force have dropped at breathtaking rates.
They're about 25 percent lower than they were 15 years ago. Earnings
for high school graduates are not down that much, but they're also down
significantly.

The only people for whom earnings have increased in the
last 15 years are people who get out of high school with usable skills
and have at least some kind of education and training for about two
years after high school. It can be in the work place; it could be in
the service; it could be in a community college; it can be in a
college, but you have to create this sense of ongoing upgrading of the
skills if we're going to grow the middle class and shrink the
underclass in this country. If we could do that, a lot of our other
problems would be smaller. (Applause.)

I want to emphasize again that this has been a bipartisan
effort, which perhaps ought more properly to be a nonpartisan effort.
After all, in the post-Cold War era, there are certain things that are
critical to the American Dream -- growing the middle class and
shrinking the underclass and giving people the chance to help
themselves is clearly that. We ought to have partisan differences over
how best to achieve that goal, but we ought to be committed to that
goal. And if you're committed to a goal, very often you wind up
agreeing on the details.

For example, there's been a remarkable amount of
bipartisan support in the United States Congress and in the
administration on what the defense budget ought to be at the end of the
Cold War. Everybody knows it has to go down, and everybody knows it
shouldn't go down too much because every time in our history we've
taken it down too much, we have wound up getting ourselves in trouble,
and we have to build it up all over again. Better to spend enough
money to maintain the strongest military in the world to prevent bad
things from happening. So we argue a little bit around the edges, but
more or less we are moving in the same direction, because we understand
that's important to our security. The same thing could be said today
about the other problems we have.

We have two big deficits in America today. We've got a
huge government deficit -- a budget deficit. But we also have an
education and training deficit. And we can't solve one without the
other. We ought to bring both into balance. We ought to get rid of
both deficits. And I think we can.

In the last two years, we've made a remarkable amount of
progress. Over a seven-year period, the budgets that were adopted in
the last couple of years reduced the deficit by $1 trillion. Your
budget deficit would be gone today, we would be in balance today, were
in not for the interest we have to pay on the debt we ran up in just
the 12 years before I took office. (Applause.) So this is a -- what I
want to say to you is that this idea of having a big structural deficit
in America with our budget is a new idea, but it didn't happen
overnight. And we can't solve it overnight, but we have to solve it.
And we are moving on it, and we will continue to do so.

We also see in the last two years, thanks to Senator
Kennedy and others, a remarkable bipartisan assault on the education
deficit -- big increase in Head Start; the Goals 2000 initiative, which
is designed to see that more of our schools meet really high standards,
and that we measure them and tell people the truth about how our
schools are doing, but that we help our schools to achieve those
standards through grass-roots reforms. We've reformed the student loan
program, to lower the cost of college loans, make the repayment terms
easier, but be tougher on collecting the bills so that the defaults
have gone from $2.8 billion a year down to $1 billion a year, but we're
making more loans to more young people at lower costs. Those are the
kinds of things that we did all in a bipartisan manner.

Now we've asked the Congress to collapse a lot of these
training programs into a big voucher so that when someone loses a job,
or if someone's working for a very low wage and they need to go back to
the community college or participate in a program like this, they can
just get a voucher from the government and use it for two years to get
training throughout a lifetime. Because all of you who are in this
program, you'll have to continue to upgrade your skills over the course
of your working life if the objective is to have good jobs, good jobs,
good jobs. These are all things that we have been doing together. And
we need to continue to do it.

There is this bill that I have spoken about, this
rescission bill. I want to tell you about it. A rescission bill is a
bill that cuts the budget in the year where you're in right now.
That's what this rescission bill -- the rescission bill proposes cuts
to the present budget year. I believe we ought to make some cuts.
We've got to keep bringing the deficit down. The problem I have with
the rescission bill that was reported out of the conference committee
between the Senate and the House is that it makes the education deficit
worse. And it doesn't even make the education deficit worse to reduce
the budget deficit, it makes it worse to increase pork barrel spending.

Earlier this year, I worked with the United States Senate
on a rescission bill which would cut exactly the same amount in federal
spending as this bill does and provide needed funds to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to deal with the horrible problem in
Oklahoma City, to help to finish the work of rebuilding California
after the earthquake, to help us to fight domestic terrorism, to do
things that really need to be done and still reduce the deficit.

But there's a right way and wrong way to do it. I think
you have to cut pork barrel projects before you cut people.
Unfortunately, in this conference committee what was, I think, a pretty
good bill became a bad bill. It cuts our efforts to help people and
puts pork back in the bill.

I want more than $16 billion in spending cuts, but there's
a wrong way and right way to do it. This bill that came out of the
committee cuts out efforts to make sure our schools are safe drug-free,
which is a big deal in a lot of places in America. It cuts our efforts
to help our schools meet new higher standards through innovative
reforms, cuts our efforts to provide college aid to young people who
will work in community service projects in AmeriCorps, the national
service program; and, yes, it also cuts school-to-work programs.

Now, in this bill, they found a way to pay for $1.5
billion worth of courthouses and special-interest highway projects and
other low-priority spending. They kept in the law an unforgivable tax
loophole which lets billionaires beat their U.S. taxes by giving up
their citizenship after they've earned the money as American citizens.
But they cut more from education, away from the Senate bill that I had
already agreed to.

Now, I believe a bill that cuts education to put in pork
is the wrong way to balance the budget, and I will veto it.
(Applause.) We should be cutting pork to give more people like these
young people standing behind me a chance to be at school-to-work.
(Applause)

I want to make it very clear: I am not against cutting
spending. I have a bill right here which will cut out their pork,
restore education, and reduce the deficit by more than the bill they're
sending to my desk. So, yes, I'm going to veto that bill, but I want
them to pass this bill. Let's cut the deficit and put education back.
(Applause.)

I want to say this again: I have no problem with cutting
spending. I've been doing it for two years. We've got to keep doing
it. This proposal cuts the pork, restores education, and reduces the
deficit by more than they propose to do it. So, yes, I will veto the
rescission bill, but I want to cut the spending. And I will send this
to Congress immediately. We shouldn't -- we shouldn't be cutting
education to build courthouses. We should be cutting courthouses to
build education. That is the right way to do it. (Applause.)

Let me also say that in the bill that went into this
conference committee between the House and the Senate there was a socalled
lock box, which I supported, which basically said, if we're
going to cut this spending, let's reduce the deficit. Let's don't
spend -- let's don't take these cuts and put them into paying for tax
cuts when we've still got a big budget deficit. The lock box was taken
out in the conference, too. And I think that was a big mistake.

You know, we cut some other things that weren't all that
easy to cut because we thought we had to bring the deficit down. I
don't think we should start by getting our priorities reversed.

And finally, let me just mention, I was with Congressman
Hoyer on Earth Day not very long ago, and I was in Maryland. We talked
about the environment. There's another thing which is in this bill
which I really object to, which would basically direct us to make
timber sales to large companies, subsidized by the taxpayers, mostly in
the Pacific Northwest, that will essentially throw out all of our
environmental laws and the protections that we have that surround such
timber sales. It will also put us back into the courts. So it would
seem to allow to cut more timber, but actually it means lawsuits and
threats to the environment.

I don't want to spend too much of your time on it, but
this kept our country tied up in court for years and years and years.
We finally got out of court with a plan that would cut trees, save the
environment and help communities in logging areas to go through
economic transformation to diversify their economy. That is the right
way to do this.

So let's go back and make this bill what it ought to be --
a deficit reduction bill that also takes care of Oklahoma City, the
California earthquake, the terrorism threat, and reduces the deficit
and keeps programs like School-to-Work in place. That is the proper
way to do it.

Remember, we have two great deficits. It is true that for
the first time in our history we let the budget deficit get out of
hand. That is true. We are bringing it down. We've got to bring the
budget to balance. That is true. But you can not do it by ignoring
the fact that one of the reasons that we're hurting is that people
aren't making enough money. And when they don't make much money, they
don't pay much taxes and that also increases government deficits not
just in Washington, but at the statehouse in Maryland, in the local
school districts, in the local communities, in the local counties.

We have to attach both of these deficits together. And we
can do it. This is a very great country, and this is not the biggest
problem in the world. This is not the second world war; this is not
the Great Depression; this is not the Civil War. We do not need to
throw up our hands. We do not need to get into a shouting match about
it. And we ought to be able to agree, just as we agreed on the goal of
national security to win the Cold War, that we are going to win the war
for the American Dream in the 21st century by getting rid of both of
these deficits, the budget deficit and the education deficit. You have
helped us by being here today. (Applause.)